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Well, they're at it again! Another US$205 million down the tubes over the next seven years, and for what? A big, fat, NOTHING! Why aren't people jumping up and down about this ridiculous waste of money? LIGO, so far, has detected NOTHING. No matter how you dress it up, it is still NOTHING...[More...]

According to Ben Owen, "What LIGO really adds is that we can see more than skin deep. Astronomers see plenty of electromagnetic waves (radio waves, x-rays, and so on) from the Crab, but pulsars are so dense that even the x-rays can't get through the interior and you can only see down to the surface. But gravitational waves can get through, so our result is the first direct look into a neutron star's interior."

Am I missing something here? How do they 'know' that gravitational waves can get through a pulsar when they have seen neither hide nor hair of gravitational waves?Is not that last sentence a non sequitur in that the fact that gravitational waves can get through pulsars is nothing to do with LIGO looking into a pulsar/neutron star?

If I have the least bit of knowledge I will follow the great Way alone and fear nothing but being sidetracked. The great Way is simple but people delight in complexity.Tao Te Ching, 53.

1) Gravitational waves [supposedly] can get through pulsars / neutron stars (assuming they exist).2) LIGO did NOT detect gravitational waves.3) How can they claim that their non-detection of gravity waves (which are supposed to be the things capable of penetrating a pulsar / neutron star) gave us a look at the core of a neutron star. The thing that is supposed to penetrate neutrons stars / pulsars was NOT observed! A negative result generally cannot make for positive assertions! There could be other reasons that no gravitational waves were detected (such as non-existence of gravitational waves, etc.)...

Am I wrong?

~Michael Gmirkin

"The purpose of science is to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated." ~Dr. Stephen Rorke"For every PhD there is an equal and oppositePhD." ~Gibson's law

I suppose the point of both of my LIGO pieces so far has been, never let the facts get in the way of the funding...

So far, both 'big news' press releases have been about NON-DETECTIONS and just how IMPORTANT they have been. Talk about SPIN...

What bursts my boils is that they are now spending US$205million to UPGRADE something which has not given any useful results yet. These upgrades are to make it (supposedly) 10 times more sensitive. Well, 10 times zero is still NOTHING, no matter how you say it. And as if it's not sensitive enough already. I mean, they say it can detect differences in length over 4 km of one hundred-thousandth the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Don't dare fart near this baby.

It's getting preposterous and something needs to be done. Of course, once you go to their site and see just how many PhDs are riding on this huge furphy you'll begin to understand why they need to continue with this charade. What I'm waiting for is the people who fund this garbage to realize they've had the wool pulled over their eyes, and turn their funds to some real science, like PC/EU. But I guess that's going to take a while yet...

According to Ben Owen, "What LIGO really adds is that we can see more than skin deep. Astronomers see plenty of electromagnetic waves (radio waves, x-rays, and so on) from the Crab, but pulsars are so dense that even the x-rays can't get through the interior and you can only see down to the surface. But gravitational waves can get through, so our result is the first direct look into a neutron star's interior."

Am I missing something here? How do they 'know' that gravitational waves can get through a pulsar when they have seen neither hide nor hair of gravitational waves?Is not that last sentence a non sequitur in that the fact that gravitational waves can get through pulsars is nothing to do with LIGO looking into a pulsar/neutron star?

That's pure logic! The negation of something proves any statement about it. "Unicorns don't exist, so all unicorns have purple horns" is a valid logic statement. (0 * something = 0). But apparently this is already stretches the intellectual capabilities of the funding reviewers....

First, God decided he was lonely. Then it got out of hand. Now we have this mess called life...The past is out of date. Start living your future. Align with your dreams. Now execute.

With how much Hype that's been put behind this, and so many reputations Publicly put at steak, this may be the Egg on their face needed for their funders to start considering other options.Let em dig a deeper hole.

Computer programs analyze data so immense that, even by distributed computing techniques, there is no quick determination of conclusions due to noise. Could some programmer be clever enough to design a program that "sees" gravity in the dirty signals? The program, as I understand it, is looking for confirmations of equations. This is becoming a serious issue with the advent of several projects that are proceeding. The Large Hadron Collider at Cern will use computers to see which sets of data will be examined by other computers. LIGO uses home computers and, if not yet, playstations and other gaming computer cycles to work on the LIGO data. It's called Einstein at Home. I reserve my computer for, no, not Extraterrestial, not LIGO, but on a project that works to minimize Pain, Suffering, and Early Death (PSED.) Folding at Home uses spare CPU cycles to work on protein folding problems.

One thing I never understood about a gravity detector is the trouble detecting gravity. Gee. Aren't tides generally attributed to lunar/solar gravitic influences?

minorwork wrote:... there is no quick determination of conclusions due to noise.

5 years of "testing/calibration" followed by another 2 years of "scientific run" - whilst I know it takes some time for results, I think they have had ample time to come up with something other than the non-results they've come up with so far. That's my point. The "results" they've lauded as significant are quite simply fraudulent attempts to show something from nothing.

Read my first LIGO piece to see just how sensitive this thing already is. It can (supposedly) detect a change in length over 4km of 100,000th the diameter of a hydrogen atom!!! And now they're making it 10 times more sensitive... even though they have not detected a gravity ripple let alone a wave of the stuff...

Wouldn't it be nice if someone could throw half a billion dollars our way instead of into the black hole of gravity wave detection...

davesmith_au wrote:Wouldn't it be nice if someone could throw half a billion dollars our way instead of into the black hole of gravity wave detection...

Cheers, Dave Smith.

We should count on doing it alone.... Ever since scientists started to show that energy is at the front of our feet and virtually free to harvest there has been a slight 'tendency' to push only the most misguided persons and projects...and take the Barack Obama way: he collected more money(>$300M!) from ordinary fellows looking for change than all the other US presidential candidates from the lobbyists.

First, God decided he was lonely. Then it got out of hand. Now we have this mess called life...The past is out of date. Start living your future. Align with your dreams. Now execute.

According to Ben Owen, "What LIGO really adds is that we can see more than skin deep. Astronomers see plenty of electromagnetic waves (radio waves, x-rays, and so on) from the Crab, but pulsars are so dense that even the x-rays can't get through the interior and you can only see down to the surface. But gravitational waves can get through, so our result is the first direct look into a neutron star's interior."

Am I missing something here? How do they 'know' that gravitational waves can get through a pulsar when they have seen neither hide nor hair of gravitational waves?Is not that last sentence a non sequitur in that the fact that gravitational waves can get through pulsars is nothing to do with LIGO looking into a pulsar/neutron star?

That's pure logic! The negation of something proves any statement about it. "Unicorns don't exist, so all unicorns have purple horns" is a valid logic statement. (0 * something = 0). But apparently this is already stretches the intellectual capabilities of the funding reviewers....

I'd really like to see the LIGO-tians try to pull this kind of word salad off in the private sector at ... oh say; 10% compounded monthly on a $205 million; 10 year fixed loan, with late fees, a rotating 15% surcharge for missed monthly payments, plus a small monthly "administrative fee".

Or, allow them a Visa card to which they can charge all related expenses under their own 'LIGO' company name for which THEY would be responsible. Were either of these the case that interferometer would end up for sale on Ebay in one year. There is no way private investors would carry this cow.

And to think Lerner only needed $2 million (?) for something that could possibly change the world's energy outlook.

"Our laws of force tend to be applied in the Newtonian sense in that for every action there is an equal reaction, and yet, in the real world, where many-body gravitational effects or electrodynamic actions prevail, we do not have every action paired with an equal reaction." — Harold Aspden

Has anyone in the gravity detection business thought to ask, "what reflects gravity waves?" ?

The reason this is germane is that all known waves exhibit reflection, diffraction and refraction phenomena. To see inside the Sun, you have to have waves in a plasma medium which exhibit reflections from boundary conditions ("impedance" changes or local speed-in-medium changes) which pass or absorb some percentage of incident energy and reflect another percentage. If a wavefront is composed of waves with wavelengths that are large WRT the object being traversed (such as a 10-20 km diameter neutron star) the wave front spreads to "fill in" the gap once past the obstructing body.

If a gravity wave can pass though a neutron star, one conjectures that the resultant wave front might be distorted coming out the opposite side, somehow, but how? And at very far distances downstream, such as at those ultra-sensitive LIGO detectors, such perturbations to the wavefront are likely to be so wide and diffuse with distance that there would be no way to detect their presence, much less form an image. Even with interferometry.

Are gravity waves similar to light, in the sense that they would be attracted toward or accelerated toward a body exhibiting its own gravity? Do they get red-shifted accelerating away from the center of a strong gravity field? Or are gravity waves also a universal constant? So much the LIGO theorists have to assume or guess at in the absence of evidence!

I think they are going to need the help of some of NASA's crack astronomical artists to help them show what the gravity waves' penetrating imagery is thought to look like, for the third round of grant requests.

Jim, those are good questions...The gravity wave, a speculation based upon assumptions, which was built around speculations on misunderstandings of what was observed, may have a place in a star trek episode, but do you think such a thing exists?

Anyway, if it does, by the time it got here it would be a ripple...

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire